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Someone please help NASA come up with a better name for New Horizons’ next space target

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Now, you can suggest nicknames on a website hosted by the SETI Institute of Mountain View, California. But don’t worry, this won’t turn into another Boaty McBoatface situation. Members of the public can nominate names, and then officials will select their favorite submissions and put them up for vote. People can also check to see which names are getting the most love over the next month.

Someone please help NASA come up with a better name for New Horizons’ next space target

Quote

Now, you can suggest nicknames on a website hosted by the SETI Institute of Mountain View, California. But don’t worry, this won’t turn into another Boaty McBoatface situation. Members of the public can nominate names, and then officials will select their favorite submissions and put them up for vote. People can also check to see which names are getting the most love over the next month.

Jeff Foust@jeff_foustMarc Buie, in New Horizons briefing at #AGU17: think MU69 is a contact binary, with a small moon orbiting it that was seen in SOFIA occultation but not in later Argentina observations.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft carried out a short, 2.5-minute engine burn on Saturday, Dec. 9 that refined its course toward 2014 MU69, the ancient Kuiper Belt object it will fly by a little more than a year from now.

Setting a record for the farthest spacecraft course correction to date, the engine burn also adjusted the arrival time at MU69 to optimize flyby science.

Telemetry confirming that the maneuver went as planned reached the New Horizons mission operations center around 1 p.m. EST at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, via NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) stations in Goldstone, California. The radio signals carrying the data traveled over 3.8 billion miles (6.1 billion kilometers) and took five hours and 41 minutes to reach Earth at the speed of light.

Operating by timed commands stored on its computer, New Horizons fired its thrusters for 152 seconds, adjusting its velocity by about 151 centimeters per second, a little more than three miles per hour. The maneuver both refined the course toward and optimized the flyby arrival time at MU69, by setting closest approach to 12:33 a.m. EST (5:33 UTC) on Jan. 1, 2019. The prime flyby distance is set at 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers); the timing provides better visibility for DSN's powerful antennas to reflect radar waves off the surface of MU69 for New Horizons to receive – a difficult experiment that, if it succeeds, will help scientists determine the reflectivity and roughness of MU69's surface.

Today's maneuver was the last trajectory correction during the spacecraft's long "cruise" between Pluto, which it flew past in July 2015, and the MU69 flyby. New Horizons Mission Design Lead Yanping Guo, of APL, said the next course-correction opportunity comes in October 2018, at the start of the MU69 approach phase. The mission team is using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Gaia mission to hone its aim toward MU69, which was discovered in 2014.

"We are on course and getting more excited all the time; this flyby is now barely a year away!" said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

The mission team will put the New Horizons spacecraft into hibernation mode on Dec. 21, where it will stay until early next June. The spacecraft is healthy and speeding away from the Sun at 31,786 miles (51,156 kilometers) per hour, or over 750,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) per day.

« Last Edit: 12/16/2017 10:39 PM by Targeteer »

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Best quote heard during an inspection, "I was unaware that I was the only one who was aware."

December 21, 2017New Horizons Enters Last Hibernation Period Before Kuiper Belt Encounter

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has entered its last hibernation phase before its January 2019 encounter with Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69.

Mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, verified that New Horizons – acting on commands uplinked to its main computer the week before – went into its hibernation mode today at 9:31 a.m. EST. With the spacecraft now about 3.8 billion miles (nearly 6.2 billion kilometers) from Earth, the radio signals carrying that confirmation message from New Horizons needed five hours and 42 minutes – traveling at the speed of light – to reach the APL mission operations center through NASA's Deep Space Network station near Madrid, Spain.

This hibernation period will last until June 4, 2018. While the spacecraft hibernates the mission team will continue to plan the detailed sequences that will tell New Horizons how to make the many planned scientific observations of MU69 during its close-range pass in the days surrounding Jan. 1, 2019.

After June 4 the spacecraft will stay "awake" until late 2020, long after the MU69 flyby, when all of the data from that flyby have reached Earth.

Follow New Horizons' path through the Kuiper Belt at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Where-is-New-Horizons/index.php.A Hibernation Refresher: During hibernation mode, much of the New Horizons spacecraft is unpowered. The onboard flight computer monitors system health and broadcasts a weekly beacon-status tone back to Earth, and about once a month sends home data on spacecraft health and safety. An onboard sequence sent in advance by mission controllers will eventually wake New Horizons to check out critical systems, gather new Kuiper Belt science data, and perform course corrections (if necessary).

The final days before NASA’s New Horizons probe barrels in on its next destination on Jan. 1, 2019, should prove eventful, with scientists trying to sort out whether a distant mini-world detected by the Hubble Space Telescope more than three years ago may actually be a swarm of icy objects.

The interview with Alan Stern is fun to listen to. Its a good summary of all the complex and hard work that preceded the exciting discoveries at Pluto.Now looking forward to New Years Day, 2019 and flyby of 2014 MU69.(Dr Stern said they'll find a better name for 2014 MU69 before then)